Innovation is a game of fractions

As we get ready for the big game, I listened to Al Pacino’s speech in Any Given Sunday. And it occurred to me if Coach was talking about innovation, he would substitute fractions for inches. 

Think about it. Innovation is all about relativity – fractions.

a) If your customers think you are innovative, a large percentage of your revenues comes from your new products and services. 2/3rds of Apple revenues come from its iOS platform – iPads, iPhones etc - which did not exist 5 years ago.

b) While every company brags about being innovative in absolute terms, measure how much innovation they deliver for every $ 1 billion of revenue. So benchmark IBM or Verizon against Google or Facebook.  Total SAP and its hosting, SI, outsourcing partner charges – almost $ 100 billion  a year – and measure how much innovation it delivers along with its partners.

c)  Measure how many times a vendor’s products are mentioned on the New Florence innovation blog. At close to 2,500 posts over the last 6 years, it is a pretty wide database of infotech, healthtech, cleantech and other innovations. No single vendor, including Apple, Google and Amazon, accounts for more than 5% of the posts.  Even the most innovative vendors are dwarfed by the overall Renaissance we are living in.

As Coach Tony D’Amato would say “Because we know when we add up all those fractions, that's gonna make the fxxxing difference between winning and losing!”